A friend recently lent me the book Mister God, This is Anna. The book centres around Fynn (the author) and his adventures with a little girl named Anna. And, as the title of the book might suggest, their greatest adventure focuses on discovering the nature of God. “Anna searched for Mr. God and her desire was for a better understanding of him,” Fynn writes, adding, “It was just my luck that I happened to be with her when she was doing her ‘working out’.”

Let me first of all say that this is an enjoyable book. The writing is engaging, the characters endearing, and the illustrations truly lovely in their inky simplicity. Most enjoyable is that the book simultaneously and beautifully blends philosophically complex ideas with childlike wonder. A particularly striking scene occurs when Lynn and Anna use mirrors to uncover “hidden worlds” dwelling within our own – a sort of glimpse into fairy land, if you like, revealing the existence of “meaning” beyond the realm of mere facts.

But, like any book, Mister God, This is Anna has its faults – namely, in this case, that the theology Anna articulates is – whatever else it may be – certainly not Christian in the orthodox sense of the term. Anna seems convinced that in order for faith in “Mr. God” to be real, it ought not to be constrained by outward rules: church, theology, even Scripture – all inhibit her from meeting God, she thinks, in his abundant openness. “People,” she asserts, “when they go to church measure God from the outside…. They don’t get inside and measure Mister God.” In order to truly know God one must fully experience (indeed, indwell) him. Everything else just gets in the way of knowing God personally.

It’s curious therefore that Anna’s own approach to God has the unintended effect of robbing God of his personhood, rather than enhancing it. For, in essence, she basically decides she will know God only on her own terms, rather than meeting him on the terms he himself provides. One needs to figure out who God is based on the world, she says, but she seems to leave no room for the idea that God himself might wish to explicitly tell us who he is. Fynn sums up Anna’s thoughts in the following way:

So far as Anna was concerned one thing was absolutely certain. Mister God had made everything, there was nothing that God hadn’t made. When you began to see what it was all about, how things worked, how things were put together, then you were beginning to understand what Mr. God was.

When you think about it, that’s the eventual conclusion of any religion which insists on knowing God solely through experience: you end up so focused on your own ideas that the personhood of God seems to slip into shadow. Everything ends up dependent on your interpretation of the world around you. To be sure, Anna propounds some fascinating thoughts (philosophical, even mystical) in the book which we can learn from. But they’re ideas about an abstract God – not the personal God she seems so eager to know.

One need only think of earthly, human relationships to understand why this approach to God doesn’t work out. Friendships aren’t built on our perceptions of other people; they’re based on actual communication. If I claim to be friends with someone – let’s say Bob, for example – then it’s important I actually listen to what Bob has to say. I can’t simply look at the type of clothes Bob wears and say, “Well, that’s Bob.” I can’t look at his house, see the environment in which he lives and then conclude I know the man. While all this can provide insight into who Bob is, it is a far cry from a real relationship. No, I must actually speak with Bob in order to know him.

Anna’s approach to God is similarly concerned with the trappings rather than the actual person, and this is why her meditations on the character of God (while interesting) nevertheless lack depth. She ends up doing what she accuses the church of: merely describing God, not actually knowing him. She views the world that God has made, contemplates the mysteries of language, biology, and much more – in essence, she views the house that God built and the clothes he wears. And based on these observations, she develops a philosophy of God. But for all that, she does not truly know him. Her “Mister God”, we must confess, remains for her a Mystery. He is too broad. He is spread too thin. He is an idea, alas, and not a person.

The personal knowledge she lacks (and which we in our sin also lack) can only be attained through real conversation with God. We cannot simply talk to and about God; we have to let him speak as well. And that’s why Scripture is so important (and why Anna’s low opinion thereof is the more unfortunate). For in these texts, God himself speaks to us. His love for us might be, as Anna reasons at one point in the book, infinitely higher than our own human capacity to love. But we only find an overt expression of that love in the Scriptures. Here we hear the God of power and creativity speak us into creation. Here we hear the God of justice speak words of judgement over our sin. Here we hear the God of love speak himself into human form, bear our sin, die in our place, and live again that we also might live.

In short, Anna’s concept of God misses the relational, incarnational mercy of God – the God who speaks human words to us, who becomes human for us, and who continues to care for us in our human endeavours. To be sure, philosophy can be good; the “heavens declare the glory of God,” as the Scripture say. But we need revelation to truly know our Creator. We need the Word of God. We need Christ – the image of an otherwise incomprehensible, invisible God.

Your review of this nasty little book is excellent, though I have taken the liberty of suggesting a re-write of the last two paragraphs in order to emphasise its dangers:

“The personal knowledge she lacks (and which we in our sin also lack) can only be attained through real conversation with God. We cannot simply talk to and about God; we have to let him speak as well. And that’s why Scripture is so important (and why Anna’s low opinion thereof is the more unfortunate). For it is in Scripture that God himself actually speaks to us. His love for us might be, as Anna reasons at one point in the book, infinitely higher than our own human capacity to love. However, it is only in the scriptures that we will successfully discover an overt expression of that love. There we will hear the God of power and creativity speaking us into creation. There we will hear the God of justice speak words of judgement over our sin. There we will hear the God of love speak himself into human form, bear the punishment for our sin by dying in our place, and live again that we also might live. In short, there in Scripture will we hear everything about God which is unknowable from mere observation of the visible, physical world.

For the underlying problem and deliberate deceptiveness of this book is that Anna’s concept of God misses the relational, incarnational mercy of God – the God who speaks human words to us, who becomes human for us, and who continues to care for us in our human endeavours. To be sure, philosophy can be good; the “heavens declare the glory of God,” as the Scripture say. But we need revelation to truly know our Creator. We need the Word of God. We need Christ – the image of an otherwise incomprehensible, invisible God. When Anna died, she did not go to Heaven, for her so-called ‘knowledge of God’ stubbornly stopped short of listening to anything God Himself wished to actually tell her about how to get there. It is also worth noting that any published work which attracts such vast numbers of atheists uniting in praise of it as this book does, is unlikely to be a reliable pointer to the way, the truth and the life, but quite the opposite. Anna took the road to Hell, which is shared with all who rely on the intellect for salvation and receive seed only by the way side, who hear the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, after which cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in their heart.”

I like this review. So many people sing this book’s praises, but the fact that many of them say ‘This is not a Christian book’ says it all, really. I was always troubled by the fact that Anna did not like the Bible. I wonder what she would’ve made of the stern Jehovah of the old testament, He of the lightning rods and the angry opening up of the earth to swallow the evildoers. How would that have affected her rosy view of God?

We can’t know God by this child’s philosophical ramblings, we can know Him only by what Jesus revealed about Him. So we must just put this book aside and find the Truth as it is revealed in the words of God’s son Jesus.

I find it hard to believe, moreover, that Anna was as depicted in the book. I believe she existed, and may indeed have had insights and intelligence above that of other children, but to remember whole long complex theological conversations of thirty years before is too much to accept, unless the author was a scribe and took it all down at the time. I think Anna was a composite of a real child and the author’s fond memories and own philosophy. She seems too unreal otherwise.

This book would sit comfortably with those who don’t want the hard truths of our own sinfulness and its consequences, and of a God of judgement – the same kind of people who like to believe in angels but not the Being who created the angels.

No, this most certainly isn’t a “Christian” book. It’s a book about a little girl who had to make it all up as she went along, given the unreliable nature of the adults in her life up to about the age of four-verging-on-five.

The way she went about it reflects very much a child whose nature might have driven her to reject and mistrust authority. God is in the firsthand, not the second. God is telling us things through his numbers, his nature, his lights and shadows. Anna as described by Fynn didn’t need to hear what other people thought God was. She needed to find him for herself and be in his middle just as she had him in hers.

I reckon Jesus would’ve got a great kick out of Anna had they been contemporaries. She certainly behaves enough like she’s a child of God rather than a child of religion. It’s more than most of us can say, more’s the pity.

This book certainly isn’t a Christian book, and that’s what makes it so magical. Its insights transcend the myths (or symbols) that we use to define our lives.

Of course, this is like trying to bite your own teeth: using language – which is effectively a myth- or image-generator, to describe the ineffable. And this is where I think your criticism lacks depth. Anna has no other way to describe God but as an outside thing (‘she ends up doing what she accuses the church of: merely describing God, not actually knowing him’). Naturally you need to use words and images to describe an idea – anything, for that matter. But what you are meant to grapple with and appreciate, are the ideas that lie at the heart of these explanations. This is the good stuff, the stuff we are looking for. The inside stuff.

So your review was clinical. Yet by being clinical, it was rooted in the realms of ‘property’ as opposed to ‘function’. You’re being told to keep off the grass and you’re keeping off it!

Thank you for an excellent review of this fascinating book. I wondered what the essence of its teaching is – pantheism, existentialism, logical positivism – but I’m not a philosopher so I gave up classifying it. Your review expresses what I was unable to do. As you say, it’s certainly not Christian. Yet in many parts it sounds Christian, and there lies a great danger. And the delightful character of Anna inevitably grips the reader emotionally, which makes the book much more dangerous still. Anna’s complete delight in her God is very attractive, and that’s a helpful reminder for the Christian who is caught up in doing things for God more than being filled with wonder at what Jesus Christ has done for him. To reject the Bible, the cross, the church, and salvation in Jesus Christ alone – which is what this book does – is to reject God himself.